First off, thank you so much for creating Plexamp!! It is awesome in so many ways. I’ve been using it since September 2020 and became a PlexPass lifetime member. I use it to play my large private CD collection (ripped to FLAC). I do have a short list of enhancements I would like you to consider in future releases. Thank you.
Enable “Play Next” and “Add to Queue” options even when the queue is empty. Many times I want to add albums to queue and not start playing until I manually select the ‘Play’ control. Right now, the first album added will automatically start playing as I add additional albums. Not a major thing, but would be nice.
Grid view for albums by artist (like the regular Plex player). Plexamp currently only provides a list view. You could add an option to control this preference, with list view being the default with the option to set grid view.
Provide a “Build Custom Mix…” at the album level. Scenario is I want to select five or so albums and let them play in random mode. Sort of like the old 5-disc carousel CD player paradigm (i.e. Load up 5 discs and hit the random function button). Your current support of build custom mix for artists is great and I do use it, but sometimes I want to randomize a handful of albums, not artists. You wouldn’t need to provide any ‘similar albums’ logic based on the first album, just provide the full list of albums and let me add an album by either scrolling to it and selecting or using the search box to type the album name to get to it quickly.
Clear queue option (like the regular Plex player). Either by providing a ‘x’ function and/or a ‘Clear’ button. Provide a confirm dialog when using the clear button. You could provide a preference as to whether to display any type of clear queue controls.
Support Plexamp for Windows as a casting target. I have a Windows computer with Plexamp connected to my main music system (PC USB out → DAC → Integrated amp). I want to be able to control Plexamp for Windows using my iPhone Plexamp app.
Enable random function toggle for current queue contents at any time. For example, if I add 5 albums to the queue, let me hit the random button to randomize playback. But from my request above about providing a “Build Custom Mix” at the album level, that would satisfy my use case and I wouldn’t need changes to the random function button. But in general I’m confused with the new random function. I would like it to be available all the time and it would toggle the random/not random current contents of the queue.
Thanks for considering these Plexamp enhancements.
Propper shuffle.
Turning shuffle on should actually shuffles items in the current queue.
Any queue created any way, explicit or implicit should be able to be shuffled.
Turning shuffle off should resume to previouis unshuffled state or to default sorting if there was no previous state.
The current newish shuffle buton seem to be disabled and off and unshuffling soetimes does nothing either, button just flicks back to shuffled
If a queue is created eg. by library > tracks > shuffle… turning shuffle off in my casting to pi from mobile situation, stops the current track playing and creates a new queue. this does not happen in my windows version where the current track keeps playing but when unshuffled it creates an alphabetical tracklist from the current playibng track name. not sure how thats expected but at least the track keeps playing…
You can do that… when in a section in library mode, click the encircled ... icon in the top-right corner of the app. There you can pick the display mode (list or grid) and sort order (e.g. sorting by album artist).
“Build Custom Mix…” at the album level
While there’s no dedicated “mix builder”, you can achieve that using the filter function from the action bar in library mode (e.g. filtering by album titles or a combination of criteria) – then play/shuffle from that filtered library. Not saying your suggestion isn’t reasonable… just implying it’s kind of possible
Clear queue option
Long-pressing the play/pause button in the mini-player will clear your queue.
Casting Target
Why not run a regular Plex client for that purpose?
Hopefully Elan Feingold will provide some insight into the current implementation of the “Shuffle” function and whether it can be enabled in more use cases to shuffle/unshuffle the current play queue contents. My use case is add some albums to the queue and be able to hit shuffle. Currently, the shuffle function is ‘disabled’ in this case.
The Grid view for albums I’m talking about is when you navigate into the artist from the artist list. The albums are always list view. There is no ‘…’ function to select grid/list from that view.
Build Custom Mix at album level. Indeed using the filter function to select a group of albums by album name would work, but is quite laborious. I do use the filter function at higher level (e.g. shuffle a genre or shuffle all albums from a particular year), but adding 5 albums by album name takes too much time. The mix builder concept is great. Just thinking because they have it at the artist level, maybe it could be added at the album level without too much development cost.
Clear queue option. I was not aware of the long-press of the play/pause button. I will start using that. Thanks.
Casting target. I was aware using the regular Plex player would work, but would like to use Plexamp across the board when playing music.
You’re running into an unfortunate combination of implicit up next and the fact that we don’t allow shuffling play queues once they have an up next region. It’s a server thing which we may look into changing in the future.
Elan,
Thanks so much for responding with development status of a few of my feature requests. Very positive news on being in your Plexamp plans down the road.
Please also consider thinking about my use case of selecting a set of specific albums for shuffle play. I really like the idea of adding a simple Mix Builder from an Album list. Many times I want to select five or six albums for shuffle play (as opposed to sequential play of those albums). As I mentioned, the current ‘create filter’ function based on album names would take too much time to build.
Elan,
Yes, my basic request is I want to select a handful albums and play them in a shuffle.
I refer to it as the “CD carousel player” paradigm. Back in the day I had a 5-disc tray style CD player from Yamaha. I could load 5 CD’s in the tray platter and hit a “Shuffle” button. It would play the CD’s back in random track order. There would be a 2-3 second delay between tracks as it would physically move to a different CD and then randomly select a track. It was a hardware implemented shuffle algorithm with smarts not to repeat a track it had already played.
So I was initially happy when I read the recent release notes about the addition of the Shuffle button to the “now playing” screen. Went to check it out. Starting with an empty queue, I selected an album and hit Play. I then proceeded to select a few more albums, using the “Add to Queue” function. I then wanted to shuffle the contents of the queue (4 albums), but the Shuffle is not enabled in this case. (and you have stated the Shuffle function doesn’t work in this scenario).
So for reference, I do use Shuffle in the following scenarios:
Shuffle my whole collection from the Artists page
Shuffle a particular artist (e.g. Beatles) from artist page (Play)
Shuffle a particular album from album page (Shuffle)
Build Custom Mix by selecting the first artist and adding other artists (Play Mix)
Your current ‘Build Custom Mix’ for Artists allows me to select the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty and get a shuffle of all the albums I own by those artists. BTW, this is an awesome interface. When I first ran across it, I thought now that is cool. You even have smarts to display what you think are related artists you might want to add to the mix.
But the scenario I would like is to be able to select specific albums for a mix. (e.g. Beatles-Abbey Road, Springsteen-Born To Run, Petty-Full Moon Fever) and get shuffle playback of those 3 albums only.
Because Plexamp is so elegant , clean and simple, my thought would be to add “Build Custom Mix…” to the Album menu. After selecting the first album for a mix, I would be presented with basically an All Albums view I could scroll and tap on albums to add to the mix. Just like the Mix Builder for Artists, it would also have a search box. I was thinking you ‘would not’ need logic to show what you think related albums might be. Just present the All Albums view with the A-Z indexer for fast scrolling (using the same user selected album sorter preference, i.e. “Album Artist”).
Thanks for reading and I hope this explains my specific request.
Shuffling a couple of selected albums discussion: I too thought the new Shuffle function would allow me to toggle shuffle the current contents of the play queue. I’d like to queue a couple of albums for shuffle. For example, I’ve got 10 Wilco albums and only want to add 2 out of the 10 for shuffle play (instead of a full artist shuffle). I think this is the only shuffle scenario missing from Plexamp.
